A Personal computer is often connected to one or more printers over a network in order to enable document printing. Typically, in such an environment, a user of the PC prints a document by causing the PC to send a print job describing the document to one of the networked printers. The printer responds to the print job by printing the document.
Occasionally a printer that is presently processing a print job may encounter an event that results in the printer failing to successfully print the job. For example, a printer may fail to print the present job due to the depletion of some consumable, such as print media, ink, toner, etc. A printer may also fail to print the present job if certain internal components fail.
When a print job fails to print, the user may or may not wish to re-print the job using a back-up printer. For example, a user may wish to re-print a single copy print job using a back-up printer if the original printer only printed a portion of the job. A user, however, may not wish to re-print a multi-copy print job if the original printer successfully printed an adequate number of document copies prior to the job failure. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a user with the option of re-printing a job using a back-up printer.